


Any Difference

by PunishedPyotr



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Crossdressing, Eli is ten in this, Human Trafficking, Kaz does unsavory things for revenge, M/M, Opium, Sex Slavery, You Have Been Warned, bacha bazi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-24 23:20:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13821591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunishedPyotr/pseuds/PunishedPyotr
Summary: “Do you need a quick cultural lesson, sir?”“Yeah, go ahead.”“Kid might be a bacchá. That’s a thing here.”“Never heard of it.”“Dancing boys, sir.”





	Any Difference

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate summary: _What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan (until your boss drags it to Mother Base)._

If there’s one thing Kaz knows, it’s business.

If there’s another thing, it’s _schmoozing_.

Up until he met Ocelot, he’d never known anyone as good at sweet-talking his way into a deal as he is. And anyway, no matter how silver Ocelot’s tongue is, the man’s absolutely worthless when it comes to financials. No grasp of money. None of Kaz’s business if he seems to have an endless personal supply of it - which Kaz won’t touch for the burgeoning Diamond Dogs, of course, doesn’t know what kind of strings Ocelot’s playing with — what can he say, he makes an excellent communist. So Kaz either leaves him behind or uses him as decoration when the purpose of a meeting is not to gain allies (Ocelot’s forte), but to gain capital and resources.

So this week it’s a sheikh-turned-Mujahideen-warlord who, if Kaz plays his cards right, could hook Diamond Dogs right into the Middle Eastern arms trade for a hell of a lot less money than they’re already paying for the privilege. Sure, in the short-term it’d be cheaper to just get them directly from Pakistan like the Mujahideen do, and cut out the middle man, but this way smuggling across the border, bribes to relevant officials, and a good chunk of transportation are handled for them.

One of the biggest parts of schmoozing is partaking freely and enthusiastically in the local customs, when invited. Negotiations are just about over; the details get ironed out tomorrow, but if Kaz makes a good impression now it’ll all go smoothly. The sheikh likes him already, anyway, despite his general Westernness and the fact that he doesn’t speak a lick of Dari or Pashto and had the audacity to bring his _own_ interpreter.

So of course what does the sheikh do but throw him and his comrades a party. The free food is met with enthusiasm, and none of the sheikh’s staff seem too disappointed they only have half a dozen extra mouths to feed. When the dancers come out Kaz is glad he only took men along with him. (Though Civet, the Dari interpreter, is wholly uninterested in them. Too bad for him; he’s obligated to stay within Kaz’s reach until they can finally ditch this too-lavish mansion.) Idly Kaz notes that some of the women appear to be underaged - as in, _very_ underaged, pre-pubescent even - but he reasons it doesn’t much matter as long as their clothes stay on, which they do.

Besides, he figures, objecting to anything here would serve to sour the pot with the sheikh. That’s the last thing he wants. He needs to look at the bigger picture here.

Horse ducks out when the chillim appears, probably because they’re using some of the sheikh’s home-grown opium for it instead of the traditional mu’assel or hashish (not that tobacco products are lacking here, Kaz nearly choked on some naswar earlier). As Kaz recalls, Horse once got hooked on opiate pain killers after a surgery or something about a decade before he kicked the habit and joined Diamond Dogs; poor sap’s not going to want to sit through those cravings and would rather _die_ than endure the withdrawals again if he does give in to temptation. Kaz vaguely motions for Vicugna to follow Horse lest the sheikh raise his eyebrows at one of Kaz’s men unaccompanied in his house. Vicugna scurries off.

Of course Kaz partakes in the smoking. He just kind of wishes Ocelot were here, instead of the next country over. Things can get dicey when hard drugs are in the mix — there’s a fine line between consuming enough to look appreciative and getting too high to keep your shit together. Even after so many years Kaz has a hard time hitting that sweet spot, since he loses track of his tolerance levels for most everything except cocaine. Cocaine he can handle. Ocelot can handle _everything_ , though, probably because at any given moment, for any given drug, he’s either functionally immune to it and/or already got enough in his system to kill a small elephant. He’s useful for nudging Kaz back into line when they’ve both been imbibing.

But anyway, down the hatch.

Kaz coughs; Civet politely declines entirely, and the sheikh smiles approvingly at him. Probably appreciates Civet’s work ethic, considering even now the sheikh is still flowing through conversation with Kaz, though the latter’s responses get slower and slower to come. He starts avoiding the chillim when he realizes he’s starting to get that fuzzy feeling, but sometimes it gets passed back to him anyway and, well…

He finds his gaze drifting back to the dancers. One of the little girls, he notices, has light-colored hair peeking out from under her veil. Interesting. Haven’t seen many people like that in this region so far.

“That one understands English,” Civet translates something the sheikh says to Kaz.

“Huh,” Kaz says. “She from around here? Unusual hair color.”

“He’s from abroad.”

Kaz’s mind skips over wondering how the girl ended up _here_ to fix on the pronoun. “He?” he says, blinking.

Civet shrugs. Kaz doesn’t know if ‘he’ and ‘she’ are close enough in Dari for the sheikh to misspeak or Civet to mishear, but looking at the girl again he realizes now that something does seem kind of off. Maybe he’s just a bit too high for gender right now.

“Do you need a quick cultural lesson, sir?” Civet says in an aside.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Kid might be a bacchá. That’s a thing here.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Dancing boys, sir.”

Kaz eyes the sheikh. “So our good friend the sheikh likes ‘em young, I take it,” he says at length.

“Actually,” Civet says with a frown, “the whole practice kind of centers around them being young. Damn, if I’d known the sheikh was a bach…”

“What’s the matter?”

Civet falls silent, deliberately focusing on the carpet beneath them now instead of the little girls that Kaz nows suspects are _all_ boys. He doesn’t speak again until someone says something else he needs to translate.

The party stretches on. Dancers, both women and bacchá, rotate out; servants keep the food, drink, and opium flowing. Kaz keeps spacing out staring at the dancing boys swaying to the dombura, especially the fair-haired one when he’s on the floor. He supposes it really isn’t any more objectionable than it would be if they were girls. Their dances, and the way they sing - they don’t seem overtly sexual or anything. At least, not from Kaz’s point of view.

Eventually the night reaches a point when the sheikh has his servants usher Ermine (who looks like he’s about to fall asleep on his feet) and Shrew (who looks like he’s ready to cram his dick into the first willing hole, which could very well be Ermine) out of the room. Civet, too. Kaz is briefly alarmed but Civet tells him that the party’s over but the sheikh wants him to join in on the private after-party, and they’ll be mindful of the language barrier.

“I can insist I stay,” Civet says.

Kaz waves him off. “I’m good at navigating situations where I don’t speak the language.”

“Sure. When you’re sober.”

“Go catch up with the others. I don’t want to contradict the sheikh. That could put the whole contract in jeopardy.”

Civet considers it for a moment, and Kaz doesn’t know why he’s hesitating but then Civet just shrugs and lets the closest servant lead him away. Kaz turns to look at the sheikh. The sheikh smiles at him.

Kaz isn’t worried. He’s high, but not _that_ high. The sheikh, his brother-in-law, his cousins, his servants, his bodyguards — two dozen people in the room still and not a one of them knows that Kaz didn’t give up _all_ his weapons when he entered the mansion. He’s still got a pistol strapped to his ankle. If this is an ambush, then they’ve got another thing coming: Kaz is too slippery for sticky situations. He sent his own men away not because he didn’t want the sheikh to think he was suspicious of him, but because in the short-term _he doesn’t need them_.

But the sheikh is still acting like he likes Kaz. Kaz continues to smile and nod, both of them knowing full well Kaz doesn’t understand a goddamn thing he’s saying. To be honest, normally he’d be pretty irritated by that, but the opium haze smooths his nerves over and makes him just as agreeable as the sheikh is.

The dancers come back into the room. It takes Kaz a moment to realize that the adult women haven’t returned, it’s just the bacchá. It takes Kaz a moment longer to notice that the musician is nowhere to be seen.

An uncomfortable feeling settles in his chest when the bacchá divide up and go over to the various men lounging around - there’s about ten of them, a little less, Kaz can’t count them at a glance, but none of them go to the servants (and one of the bodyguards also stands aloof) and some of them go to two men to stand between them. The sheikh has two bacchá head for him, but he says something tersely and the light-haired one walks gracefully over instead to Kaz.

Private one-on-one dances, Kaz assumes, though he’s bothered by the absence of any music. This is getting sketchier by the second but he doesn’t want to telegraph that his hackles are raised - he can feel the sheikh watching him out of the corner of his eye. Instead Kaz raises his sunglasses to squint at the kid in front of him. Blond, with an intense expression, an almost feverish glitter in his eyes and a coy but utterly fake little smile.

Something… something about this boy is bothering Kaz, but he doesn’t know what. He blames the opium.

Kaz belatedly remembers that this one is ‘from abroad’ and is supposed to understand English. “Hey, kiddo,” he tries.

The boy doesn’t reply. Instead Kaz hears the sheikh laugh and looks over him. The sheikh shakes his head good-naturedly and raises a finger to his lips. Alright. So either the kid’s a mute or else it’s expected of him to not speak even if spoken to.

It finally clicks that something is _really_ fucky here when the boy kneels in front of Kaz and Kaz has to glance around only to see that all over the room, hands are going under the fine silks the bacchá wear. A pair of cousins are touching their shared one all over; the sheikh watches indulgently as the one standing in front of him performatively touches himself.

Throws Kaz for a loop. The oldest bacchá here is probably about sixteen. The kid at Kaz’s feet, watching him expectantly, is- ten.

Kaz shakes himself. He feels strangely certain about the boy’s age even though he’s kind of short for it, looks more like he’s seven or eight. Malnutrition, like Chico, and Kaz simultaneously curses the opium for dredging up that memory and wonders why the fuck the sheikh isn’t feeding his child whores better. Or, hell, why can’t the kid be the age he looks, and Kaz just can’t estimate it properly because his brain feels mushy?

No. He’s sure. It’s part of what’s bothering him. He doesn’t know what.

Does him being two or three years older than he looks make this any better?

The sheikh throws Kaz a concerned look, and Kaz keeps the bottom line in mind and mechanically reaches out to the boy. Slips his hand under his veil to grab a handful of blond hair and tug him forward. Kid arches his back into the move and braces himself with his hands on Kaz’s thighs - hands that, Kaz is only now noticing, are tipped with red-painted nails and encrusted in rings and bracelets.

Kaz watches the Afghans surreptitiously; there’s no violence here, the bacchá are all treated very respectfully and seem to be doing this of their own free will, for their own pleasure. Somehow that strikes Kaz as being worse than if he was watching them - and was expected to - pin the boys down and savagely rape them despite tears or protest. The blond kid practically in Kaz’s lap is looking at him with such an expression of increasingly impatient anticipation that the only conclusion Kaz can come to is that he and all the others have been groomed and brainwashed. A normal ten-year-old boy wants you to throw him a baseball, not stick your hand under his dress and pinch his nipples.

Kaz really, really doesn’t want to touch this kid.

His saving grace comes in the form of a quick but horrible way out — he sees the sheikh’s brother-in-law whip out his dick and offer it to his designated bacchá. The boy - looks to be around the blond’s age, but better fed - takes it in his mouth without any further prompting. Kaz looks back at the blond.

He can’t afford to rock the boat. He needs- _Diamond Dogs_ needs this contract to go through. Money’s tight, getting into debt just means playing right into Cipher’s hands. They can’t just… Kaz has done worse, with his own body. He’s not expected to _hurt_ the kid, that he can tell. Just seal the deal with him.

The thought flits across Kaz’s mind that the poor kid probably gets loaned out to guests of honor all the time, especially Western ones. The boy probably doesn’t even distinguish between them in his mind, probably has already had his innocence ripped from him dozens and dozens of times over.

One more won’t make any difference.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Kaz says, undoing his belt. Little shit looks let down.

Kaz can honestly say he’s never thought about what getting a blowjob from a ten-year-old is like. It had legitimately never occured to him before and if it had then he would have no desire to pursue that train of thought, anyway. But if pressed, Kaz would have guessed that a literal child’s oral sex skills would be… well, terrible. The average person never gets their mouth (or any of their parts, really) near anybody’s naughty bits until they’re at _least_ halfway through puberty. In a just world, this would hold true for _everyone_ , not just the average ones.

The little blond boy’s damn good, good enough that Kaz can get it up for him as long as he keeps his eyes closed (the sheikh won’t be able to tell with the sunglasses) and tries not to notice how small his hands are, how little it takes to make his lips stretch. The kid is _practiced_ and it makes Kaz sick but it’s the local custom and he has to follow it if he wants those guns.

Again a thought flits across Kaz’s hazy mind: Take the kid with them when they leave. Of course he doesn’t know what the fuck they’d _do_ with a child - dumping him in an orphanage probably wouldn’t pan out, not without taking him a couple continents away. Likely enough a human trafficking front was how he _got_ here in the first place. And furthermore, they could _only_ take this one boy — there are like, what, ten other bacchá who might also appreciate a ticket to freedom, but Diamond Dogs doesn’t have _space_ to smuggle all of them out, nevermind the fact that the sheikh would _notice_. One kid they could claim he just ran away, or snuck into their truck if they get caught.

The other bacchá would be left to just rot here, and who knows what would happen when they are no longer young and lithe and cute and can’t dance and sing and fuck quite as well anymore. Maybe go on to live a relatively normal life, with already-curried favor from the local sheikh. Maybe in a sense it isn’t so bad, but it’s still fucked up. Fucked up to leave them behind, too. But maybe the sheikh wouldn’t care if he loses track of just _one_. He has another ten or so, one less wouldn’t make any difference.

Sure as hell wouldn’t actually do anything to address the wider problems of human trafficking, slavery, pederasty… the sheikh sure as hell isn’t the only one who does this, Civet’s reaction was telling enough now that Kaz knows what he was referring to. Hundreds, maybe thousands or hundreds of thousands of little boys live this kind of life. Add in little girls, adults… the number probably runs in the tens of millions.

One less won’t make any difference.

Kaz isn’t here to make a difference. Or, at least, not to make _that_ kind of difference. Diamond Dogs isn’t a force for good in the world, it’s a half-starved junkyard hound slinking after Cipher’s heels. Nothing to do with extremely underaged prostitutes in glittery women’s clothing.

And it isn’t the first time Kaz had an orgasm in front of thirty people.

It’s really sickening, the way the kid licks it up, swallows, grins at him. Kaz genuinely feels nauseous. It must have shown on his face, because when the sheikh glances over again (balls deep in his own bacchá) Kaz has to put on a shaky smile and gesture towards the chillim. The sheikh laughs, and Kaz relaxes, knowing he’s successfully passed his sudden illness off as being an opium lightweight, even though he really isn’t.

He isn’t a goddamn pedophile, either. But the sheikh doesn’t need to know that - doesn’t need to know Kaz wished he _could_ reject his disgusting gift of a child who grows rapidly bored and discontent now that Kaz is finished with him and wants nothing more to do with him. He bows out, all silk and graceful limbs, but his actual exit is probably better described as a foul-tempered stalk.

What the hell is _with_ that kid, anyway?

* * *

Kaz stumbles away from the afterparty and the first thing he does is find Civet and tell him to ask the sheikh something for him. He wants the blond boy to come to his private borrowed quarters, tonight, alone.

Civet’s mouth draws into a thin line. “With all due respect, sir,” he says, “I can’t in good conscience pass that along.”

Kaz shakes his head. “Look, Civet,” he says, putting his hand on his shoulder, “just between you and me, _all_ I want to do is talk to him. I want to know if there’s anything we can do to…” he gestures vaguely with one hand, “help his situation.”

Civet pauses, his eyebrows furrowing. “Sir… I really don’t think there’s anything we _can_ do that won’t piss off the sheikh.”

“I know. I’m not about to sacrifice the whole deal just for some brat, that’s not the plan. I just want to… talk to him.”

“You get sentimental when you’re high, don’t you?”

“Maybe a little. But hell…” Kaz puts a hand on his forehead, pushing his hair back. He doesn’t know where he’s going with this. “Just do it, Civet. But let the sheikh think what he wants — if anything, it’ll just ease any offense he might have taken with how, uh, obviously uncomfortable I was with participating in his stupid _cultural practice_ earlier.”

Civet gives him an extremely dubious look, but nods. Kaz is relieved. At least his men know he only partook in that kid sex shit to secure their weapons. Those weapons are gonna go a long way. He couldn’t afford to fuck this up. Just couldn’t.

There isn’t a clock in here but Kaz estimates it’s about one in the morning when the blond boy lets himself into the mehmaan khana, wearing a different but no less flashy outfit than before. Kaz feels kind of bad, even now. Kids his age should be sleeping, not… well. Looks like he was just woken up for this, too - he gives Kaz a bleary sour look, clearly having already lost all potential respect for him - and pointedly rubs his eyes.

“Hey, kiddo,” Kaz tries again.

Kid just stares at him. Raises his eyebrows slightly.

Enough of the opium haze has lifted that Kaz is starting to place what’s bothering him about the kid: he looks familiar. Squinting at him in the light dim enough that he was able to take off his sunglasses, Kaz thinks he realizes what’s striking him as familiar, at any rate. The boy’s white, but not fully. He’s at least _part_ asian, not half like Kaz but more along the lines of something like a grandparent from further east than this place. Maybe even Japan. Kaz feels a sense of kinship for him - now that he thinks about it, he probably would anyway; he knows what it’s like to have blond hair and blue eyes in a part of the word where those traits don’t really occur naturally. He wonders if the other bacchá tease him about it.

No, that’s not entirely it. There’s something else, and it’s eluding Kaz. Maybe it’ll finally occur to him in the morning.

“How come you don’t speak?” Kaz says, pressing on despite his confusion and the cold reception. “I know you understand English, you definitely demonstrated it earlier.”

The boy shrugs.

“Come on. Talk to me. You mute or something?”

He shakes his head, says something in Dari. His voice is nowhere near breaking.

“Great.” Kaz scrubs his hand over his face, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed’s thin mattress, on the only side of the bed not blocked off by the bench-like frame. “Look, kid, if you can understand English then you can speak it. And personally, I can’t understand Dari. Farsi. Whatever.”

Shakes his head again, frowning now. He crosses his arms.

Kaz raises an eyebrow, scrunitizing the boy. “Let me guess… you’re forbidden from actually _speaking_ English. And speaking Farsi just now was probably pushing it, huh.”

“…”

“I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

The boy cocks his head, looking at him suspiciously.

“I just want to talk,” Kaz insists.

For a few moments the boy doesn’t say anything, and seems to be considering something, but then he trots over, climbs up on the bed, and perches himself on the ‘armrest’ of the bedframe. He sits with his legs spread but his skirt is long enough that he’s not putting himself on display here. He preens a little, adjusting his veil, then finally speaks: “That’s what they all say.”

Kaz can’t even respond for a moment, he’s stunned. The kid has a _London accent_. He’d been assuming he was some colonial war orphan who got snatched up in Africa, not a genuine fucking first-worlder over four thousand miles from home.

“You think you’re the first guest to call a bacchá to his room and say he just wants to talk?” the kid says disdainfully, playing with a lock of hair by his cheek. “All the non-Afghans do this, they act like this is so bad and strange and everything is awkward in the big room but then at night, they call us to their rooms and they _say_ they want to talk but what they _actually_ do is-“

“Woah,” Kaz says, holding his hands up, “woah. Okay. Slow down.”

“I see how it is,” the boy says with a sneer, “you wanted me to talk to you, but now you want me to shut up… you’re just like all the others!”

“I’m _not_ ,” Kaz says. “I literally just want to talk to you. I thought it was strange enough that you understand English, but - a London accent, at your age? As in, you’re a native speaker.”

“So what?”

Man, Kaz had no idea how right he was when he called him a brat earlier. No wonder he’d been forbidden to talk - though Kaz had to wonder what kind of punishments a willful little bastard like this would fear enough to comply. “ _So_ … what’s your story, kid? How’d you end up here?”

“…” The kid looks away.

“Not a great place to start, huh? Alright, can you at least tell me your name?”

Plain hesitation, but he says, “Eli.”

“Okay,” Kaz says, “Eli.”

* * *

They talk for a while and then Kaz sends him off to bed without once touching him no matter how much he expects the other shoe to drop. Turns out he’s from London after all, and his “handlers” (Kaz isn’t sure what he meant by that, maybe it was some kind of school trip) took him to Egypt a few years back and then didn’t care when he got lost. Long story short he got picked up by human traffickers who sold him to the sheikh. He makes a passing reference to receiving frequent beatings during the first few months, when he was still learning how to be a bacchá and everything that entailed — he’s put off by Kaz’s concerned expression when he says that. Doesn’t seem to realize how fucked up all of this is.

Kaz points it out to him. He gets waved off, but little Eli looks troubled and he’s got that feverish glitter in his eyes again.

The next morning the sheikh is discovered dead in his bed. He was strangled with his own scarf.

Kaz and his men are the first to fall under suspicion, which is only natural, even if Kaz wants to stop them and ask why the _hell_ would they kill their ticket to the Pakistani arms smuggling market. Then it comes out that one of the bacchá disappeared in the night: Eli. The theory changes to an outside intruder who came to kidnap one of the slaves, and the little blond one must have just been convenient. (Kaz raises an eyebrow when Civet translates this. So it’s a given in the sheikh’s household that no one would want Eli on his own merits, huh?)

But after a few hours’ investigation and some mumbled testimony from one of the servants, it becomes clear that Eli wasn’t _kidnapped_ by the sheikh’s killer - he _is_ the sheikh’s killer. He evidently went straight from Kaz’s room to the sheikh’s quarters, climbed onto his bed and murdered him right there. Then fled into the desert.

They don’t bother looking for him. If he wasn’t eaten by a bear or a snow leopard during the night, then he’ll surely die of exposure during the day.

The sheikh’s brother-in-law closes the deal with Kaz with no complications. Diamond Dogs takes its exit here; the mood in the truck as they drive away is somber. Even the normally chatty Vicugna is pensively silent. Honestly, it seems like it’d be nice right about now to have someone around who really truly could not give less of a fuck.

Kaz thinks about Ocelot.

And suddenly he realizes _that_ is what bothered him so much about Eli. He looks - looked - _exactly like Big Boss_ … well, minor differences aside. But close enough that he was _obviously_ his son; Kaz has known for years about Big Boss’ sterility, and besides that his social ineptitude - he knows this isn’t a case of a pregnant one-night-stand or a forgotten girlfriend. The age fits, too, no wonder Kaz was so certain of it.

Of course, he had no idea that either of the Les Enfants Terribles kids were even missing. Had no way of hearing about it at this point, of course, but goddamn that must have been what Eli meant about his handlers. Cipher cut him loose him in Africa. Maybe even sold him to the traffickers directly.

One more piece of fuel for the fire of his rage against them, then. One more dead kid to take revenge for.

Kaz sighs, leans back in his seat, and closes his eyes.

* * *

The Nyoka ya Mpembe retrieval mission goes off without a hitch, aside from the forced confrontation between the Boss and the brat; even that goes well, though, and the Boss drags him back to the helicopter without much trouble and certainly no resistance. From the sound of it the little soldier decided to completely give up upon the defeat. Seems odd to Kaz, but then again he guesses that for children especially, constant and continual victory is the only way to stay alive out here.

It’s difficult for Kaz to see nowadays, but he’s already glanced over the intel for the mission, so when the kid hops out of the helicopter back at Mother Base Kaz isn’t surprised by the blond hair and, well, general fact that he’s white. Colonial war orphan or something, it happens, in a twisted sense he’s lucky he got to _be_ a child soldier - his only other option might have been being torn apart by the locals.

Kaz doesn’t pay much attention to him, at any rate. He’s got other things to concern himself with right now. He hardly notices the way the White Mamba stops and stares at him or at least in his general direction.

“It’s you!” he suddenly says in surprise, and it’s been about two years and the sound of his voice - his  _accent_ \- makes Kaz’s blood freeze instantly.

The Boss looks between Kaz and the kid a few times, then turns to Kaz. “You two know each other?”

“No,” Kaz says immediately, too forcefully, breaking out in a cold sweat right there.

The brat - _Eli_ \- scowls at him, but thankfully he’s dropped back into the same moody silence as the rest of the time the Boss has been around him. Kaz cuts a quick exit, as best as he can manage with the cane, anyway. He’d like to think the Boss would take _his_ word over his newly-found son’s, but…

“What’s eating you?” Ocelot says.

“…” Kaz swallows hard. “That fucking kid knows too much.”

Ocelot raises an eyebrow. And God help him, Kaz can only imagine he’ll be talking to Eli later. Nothing Kaz can do about it.

Those nine years, though, Kaz did a whole lot of unsavory things. Ocelot knows all thats, knows more than Kaz would like to think he knows, Kaz is well aware. Quite frankly, participating in some fucked up kid sex slavery shit to butter up the locals is… admittedly a bit further down on the iceberg here, but Kaz has done a hell of a lot of things the Boss wouldn’t approve of.

So let Eli talk - to Ocelot. Ocelot already _has_ plenty of blackmail on Kaz, more than enough to bury him six feet under and then some. Kaz stalks off.

One more… won’t make any difference.

**Author's Note:**

> Quick note about the mention of a mehmaan khana: If you go to Wikipedia, there’s no mention of it being a thing in Afghanistan. However, I don’t do research exclusively on Wikipedia my other research turned up a lot of references to mehmaan khana around Kabul (which is in a Dari-speaking region), where they specifically note a space for male guests and women aren’t allowed to go in. Not that that… comes up here… anyway, that came up while I was trying to figure out what traditional beds in Afghanistan are like, cuz I didn’t think they’d be like European ones, y’know? Still don’t know if they have a particular name or anything, in the end I could only find what they _look_ like by searching “تخت سنتی” on google.com.af - and yes, they really do look like benches.
> 
> (  
> (any and all comments will be forewarded to aireyv! i will either copy/paste their reply to me or they will reply on their own account! have a nice day!!! if you have any questions, just ask!!!!)


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